


Winning Thoroughly

by Arbuscular



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Homestuck
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 17:53:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/839694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arbuscular/pseuds/Arbuscular





	Winning Thoroughly

He’s floating, he realizes. Except he isn’t him, but a her. What? Of course she’s a her. She’s always been a her. She’s floating—not like under the harsh pressure of water—but in the air. Attached to nothing. There is a great orb—a planet?—above her. It’s beautiful. Wispy white clouds dance on its blue surface and as she watches, mesmerized, images form in them. A world filled with black and white corpses, red blood staining a strange checkered landscape. A boy, with eyes of cerulean and wind ruffled hair. She knows him and she aches because she can’t remember his name. And a dog—warm and soft and loving and oh so loyal—  
  
Harry finds himself back inside his cupboard, as always. It’s cramped and dark and its cobwebbed confines are so very different than the blue world of his dream.  
  
He’s had these dreams as long as he can remember. They’re not like his other dreams, with the red haired woman and the green light, the screaming and the sound of wind. That one is a memory, he thinks, because it’s the same every time.  
  
Aunt Petunia yells at him when he asks her about the green and red dreams. Says he should quit with his freakishness and get back to weeding her too-perfect garden. There’s always a tightness in her face that he can’t recognize. Maybe it’s fear or guilt? He can’t tell.  
  
He ties a string around his finger to remind himself not to ask again.  
  
He likes the garden, so he doesn’t mind when his aunt tells him to tend to it. He wishes he could grow some pumpkins though. He just knows that they could be so terribly useful.  
  
Sometimes he dreams of a place with glass walls and lots of pumpkins. He likes that place, which is both familiar and not.  
  
He knows there’s something different about him. Something more than the ‘freakishness’ that his aunt is so fervent in stamping out of him. Sometimes he thinks he can almost taste it, whatever it is. And then it floats just out of his reach like a particularly stubborn bubble. Or maybe that is the ‘freakishness?’ But it sure doesn’t feel freakish!  
  
There’s a cat lady that lives down the street. Not an actual lady that’s a cat (what a horrible idea!), but an odd old lady who has way too many of the godforsaken creatures. He can’t understand why anyone would want to live like that. Cats are so smelly and rude! And they are for chasing, not petting. How some people didn’t understand such a simple thing was extremely perplexing.  
  
She certainly seems like a more ‘freakish’ person than him, though whenever he thinks that he feels kind of guilty, so he tries not to. But when his aunt would leave him with the woman while her family went out to do ‘normal people things,’ it’s sometimes hard. Those are the days he thinks he hates the most. After a few days like that he hated nothing more than the foul whiskered creatures, except possibly their caretaker. She was the farthest thing from a proper host. She kept serving him this terrible stale cake. At least he thought it was cake. At some point, in the very, very distant past he’d been allowed a piece, and it looked a lot like what she served him. Didn’t taste at all the same though! Mrs. Figg is not a very good cook. The word cook probably shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near her.  
  
Harry didn’t really have any human friends. Which was perfectly fine with him because they were really confusing! And most of them were taller than him, even in his age group. Which really grated on him. They also didn’t understand the wonders of pumpkins. He wondered if he would ever find anyone that did. It was a tragedy, really. Pumpkins were such fantastic things! One day, Harry decided, he would teach the whole world about the wonders of pumpkins so that everyone could enjoy their magnificence.  
  
Sometimes, when he was in the garden, doing garden-y things, he would talk to the snakes. Not like Mrs. Figg did with her cats, but like a completely rational person who was actually capable of speaking their language, which totally wasn’t crazy at all. Other than their constant mentions of dead rodents, they weren’t the best conversationalists, but it was still nice to have someone to talk about pumpkins to! They weren’t very good at changing the subject, so Harry could keep talking about them for hours.  
  
He had secretly given names to the snakes he talked to most often - secretly, because he had a sneaking suspicion they wouldn’t appreciate them. Which was silly of him to think because LuLu and Godfrey were perfectly acceptable names for snakes! He’d named one of them Sir Fido, who had then been rude enough to tell him to never try naming anything ever again. He didn’t listen because he was a rebel, gosh darn it! And not listening to a snake who had absolutely no authority over him at all was most definitely a rebel-y thing to do. He was just (one-sidedly) chatting with Geraldine Cooper about the importance of proper care during the first stages of pumpkin growth (it really affects color later on) when a rather menacing-looking brown owl (Was that a tawny owl? He wasn’t sure) swooped down next to him, with a yellowish envelope tied to its leg.  
  
“How can you fly like that? That must be awfully annoying! I’m Harry. Do you want some help with that?” Birds didn’t usually talk back to him, but just because something doesn’t talk back doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t understand you. And it was almost as good as talking to snakes, anyway, and sometimes better, since birds never complained about his pumpkins! The envelope was thick and a little bit waxy. Harry thought it was kinda neat.  
  
His name was written in a spidery green script, which he thought must have been very difficult to manage. His handwriting looked like the demented wanderings of a piss drunk centipede that had fallen into a well of ink. The owl flew off with nothing more than a rather haughty glance back.  
  
“Well that was odd,” he commented to Geraldine, “I wonder what this letter’s about?” He noticed he wasn’t talking to anybody.  
  
“Gosh darn it Geraldine, could you stop running off?”


End file.
